What the “triumph of the nerds” can tell us about the place of media in people’s lives.

Comic book superheroes, fantasy kingdoms, and futuristic starships have become inescapable features of today’s pop-culture landscape, and the people we used to deride as “nerds” or “geeks” have ridden their popularity and visibility to mainstream recognition. It seems it’s finally hip to be square. Yet these conventionalized representations of geek culture typically ignore the real people who have invested time and resources to make it what it is.

Getting a Life recentres our understanding of geek culture on the everyday lives of its participants, drawing on fieldwork in comic book shops, game stores, and conventions, including in-depth interviews with ordinary members of the overlapping communities of fans and enthusiasts. Benjamin Woo shows how geek culture is a set of interconnected social practices that are associated with popular media. He argues that typical depictions of mass-mediated entertainment as something that isolates and pacifies its audiences are flawed because they do not account for the conversations, relationships, communities, and identities that are created by engaging with the products of mass culture.

Getting a Life combines engaging interview material with lucid interpretation and a clear, interdisciplinary framework. The volume is both an accessible introduction to this contemporary subculture and an exploration of the ethical possibilities of a life lived with media.

“Long overlooked by those who study fandoms, subcultures and gendered identities, the Geek now gets the attention it deserves. Benjamin Woo’s Getting a Life: The Social Worlds of Geek Culture is a witty, smart book marked most of all by its methodological agility. Woo moves in to examine geek culture up close, then pulls back to illuminate its relationship to taste cultures, the boundary-work of social in-groups and the shifting relationship of capitalist media producers to their fans. Wit and humour run through this engaging book, but so, too, does a commitment to taking Geek culture seriously and fashioning the analytical tools with which to understand it." Will Straw, McGill University, and co-editor, with Alexandra Boutros, of Circulation and the City: Essays on Urban Culture“An entertaining and informative romp through contemporary social philosophy and media theory that, for all its academic rigour, never lifts its gaze from its central focus: the geek. Woo’s smart prose and the notion of the geek as a subcultural type make for a book that is both lighthearted and readable, yet valuable as a piece of media theory in its own right.” Quill & Quire

Benjamin Woo is assistant professor of communication and media studies at Carleton University.

Acknowledgments | vii

Introduction: “What Is a Nerd?” | 3

1 Talk Nerdy to Me: The Meaning of Geek Culture | 292 Taking Geek Culture Seriously: A Practice-Theoretic Account | 493 Values and Virtues: What Is Best in Life? | 674 Careers: Boldly Going On | 895 Making Communities from Mass Culture | 1086 Institutions: Building Worlds between Production and Consumption | 1317 The Limits of Participation | 1528 The Geek, the Bad, and the Ugly | 172